Coping Strategies for Women in IT 648
Ian Lamont writes "Female workers are losing ground in the IT profession, reports Computerworld, citing statistics which show a sharp drop in the number of female CS grads since the 1980s, and a decline in the percentage of women in the IT profession since 2001. According to the article, causes include pervasive stereotypes and the locker-room atmosphere found in some IT shops — attitudes which some readers may recognize from the comments in a Slashdot thread last week. The IT professionals interviewed in the Computerworld article discuss a variety of strategies for coping. They range from trying to 'out-boy the boys' to watching what you say, as one Sun Microsystems executive describes:'It's not unusual to be the only woman at a meeting, she says, and because of that, there's often a tendency to remain silent unless you think you have something really remarkable to say. "As one member of a small group, you feel you have no right to be mediocre ... You're not just representing yourself; you're representing [females] with a capital F.'"
Slashdot... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Need Good Looks (Score:5, Informative)
Looking good as a career booster is not limited to womenses.
Departments (Score:2, Informative)
The article does make some good points. I've seen this in the college level, where the female students just didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the bunch on the higher level. Sometimes because they had a hard time with the learning curve (programming classes dropped by about 40% after mid terms), or they just didn't feel comfortable with the students around them. Those who did make it were very good at what they did.
In short, I do believe it can be harder for them to reach the bar, due to others around them, and I think that can be helped. However I don't think the bar should be lowered to help more get in.
Re:Different (Score:5, Informative)
A minority? Sure, I can live with being a minority. I'm pretty used to it. And I know full well my interests and talents skew differently than those of most women I know. But that doesn't mean I should be treated with hostility simply for existing.
Re:Been there, seen that... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Its 100% factual (the parentpost), citations : (Score:2, Informative)
Everything I wrote is 100% factual.
You could easily lok up each fact on your own if you bothered to try/
But here are merely some references for you to read up on :
Alexander & Hines (2002) gave 44 vervet monkeys of each sex six toys to play with; two male-typical (a toy car and ball), two female-typical (a doll and pot) and two sex-neutral (a book and stuffed animal). Male ververts were more likely than females to engage the car and ball while females were more likely to play with the doll and pot. No difference was found in the neutral toys. Neonatal androgen exposure has been linked to play preferences in rats, rhesus monkeys, vervet monkeys, chimpanzees and human females.
Lawrence H. Summers :
The university president that was fired for highlighting this toy effect also stated that he tried to alter preferences with his own daughters. He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls. After merely mentioning this FACT in a public speech, as a role as an economist, not president, in January 1995 he was repidly fired in the following weeks. The president was president of HARVARD (Lawrence H. Summers). Angry ignorant woman refused to even discuss the facts and started a protest to get the president fired. The president of Harvard was fired for merely mentioning biological facts.
WWDC conference :
I do not remember the three names, but one was named "chris"(?) and at the time was passing half-male (though wore womens cloths such as blouses), and two were passing as females. But it is true. "chris" in fact attended Mac Hack conferences as a highly skilled hacker. Three transgendered computer hacker-engineers is three more than the zero females that year. A few females headed software companies and were at that WWDC conference, (Linda K, Heide R) but they are not, nor ever were , skilled coders.)
NASA :
Its public knowledge. for the first time ever all three KEY positions of the failed mars missions were female :
Sarah A. Gavit = the mars project manager
Suzanne E. Smrekar, 37, the lead mars scientist
Kari A. Lewis= the mars project's chief engineer
Other females to blame :
Lori B. Garver = Associate Administrator for NASA's Office of Policy and Plans, Executive Secretary of Advisory Council (She does not have an engineering degree!)
NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of whack with societies norms.
from the female mars leader in a NYT interview :
"Women have really added to the workplace because we do come at things from a different angle," she said.
"For the same reason that cultural diversity works, gender diversity is wonderful, too, especially when you're trying to do something creative."
Also from the female mars leader Gavit:
"The fact that we're women hasn't made a difference," she said. "It's not an issue here. But it's good that young girls see that engineering and technical fields are wide open to women. That's the good thing about saying it's a woman-led team."
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/0
The report in The Guardian (British) December 7th included the following comment: "The total launch and development costs of NASA's lost Mars spacecraft is put at $320 million. A Third of billion wast3ed on gender equality despite IQ.
I am perplexed as to why you doubt my 100% factual post.
If anything in it is outlandish or hard to believe then merely try to disprove it with a fact, or tell me WHICH statement you think is not 100% correct.
I expected female attacks. I made certain I told no lies. My original article is 100% factual in every way. I have no reason to lie or distort facts.
Political Correctness hates facts, but I embrace them.
My experiences with women in the workplace (Score:3, Informative)
All of them worked like anyone else. They all seemed to be treated just fine. And most of them were management, too... VPs on down to various sorts of middle management.
I've never seen the "glass ceiling." To the contrary, I've seen a disproportionate number of women handing out the orders, when compared to their population. I've never seen a low-ranked woman busting her ass 24 hours a day to be "taken seriously."
I realize this is an anecdote and not data.
Re:Different (Score:2, Informative)
This is the biggest bunch of BS, I never was encouraged to pursue computer science, I was simply interested in it and persued CS in college. No one was there telling me when I graduated H.S. that CS is the future I all ready had my mind made up. Further more most kids interested in tech are picked on or socially shunned for being geeky remember the movie NERDS. The fact is if your truly interested in IT then you will persue it, it's high time we stopped blamming society for these problems.
That's not a troll, by the way... (Score:3, Informative)
Ladies? (Score:3, Informative)
Not to discount your views, but $DAUGHTER is doing graduate work in exactly this subject (sociology of gender in the technology workplace) and none of the simple answers seem to hold water. It's a real puzzlement.
OTOH, I'll tell you now that if you contact her (/. DarlingDaughter) she'll be very interested in what you have to tell her.
Re:Sex harrassment lawsuits, quotas, and worse ! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sex harrassment lawsuits, quotas, and worse ! (Score:2, Informative)
Grrr. Bloody Slashdot made my comment illegible. Re-posted with non-broken formatting:
I know I'm going to regret debating gender with an anonymous coward on Slashdot, but referring to trans women as "transgenderred [sic] males" is just a little too offensive to let pass. There's good evidence to suggest that transsexualism is caused by congenital differences in certain parts of the brain involved with gender identity and sexuality [1] [2]. Essentially, we really are born with female brains. There's also evidence to suggest that a number of anatomical features of our brains shift to opposite-sex proportions during the first few months on hormones [3].
As for your ideas on explaining the sex ratio in technology jobs by men having a wider IQ distribution than women, I just don't think the numbers hold up. While there seems to be some support for men's IQ distribution having a larger standard deviation than women's, it just isn't enough to support your claim that "the chance of a person having an IQ of 125 is eight times more likely for males than females." The idea certainly isn't an implaausible one at extremely high IQ scores; all it would take would be an X-linked trait that sufficiently influences IQ for people with XY chromosomes (mostly masculine-gendered) to have a wider distribution than people with XX chromosomes (mostly feminine-gendered), and XY people *do* have a wider range of variation on a lot of different traits, probably because of a mechanism like this.
The problem is that the effect would be just too small to make that big a difference; some quick googling turned up at most support for a one or two point difference in standard deviation, and that certainly wouldn't lead to a factor of eight difference at scores as low as 125. A one point difference in male versus female standard deviation of IQ in a population with an overall standard deviation of 16 points leads to men being twice as likely as women to have an IQ over 150, and only one person in a thousand of either sex scores that high. No matter what inflated opinions Slashdotters might have of themselves, I can say very assuredly that the great majority of IT workers do not have 150+ IQs. This sort of theory is probably only useful for explaining sex ratios in elite groups like Nobel prize winners, and I'd be rather skeptical even then of the assumption that the distribution of extremely high IQ scores can be obtained just by extrapolating the distribution for the middle-scoring bulk of the population.
[1] A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality [symposion.com]
[2] Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus [endojournals.org]
[3] Changing your sex changes your brain: influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure [eje-online.org]
Re:Different (Score:2, Informative)
Because I HAVE a child, I take less risks in my career. I have to always be sure that there is good insurance, and know how long it will take to kick in. THese days, if it takes more the 30 days to get benefits, I won't even consider it. I certainly won't take the risk of starting that business I always wanted to. It's not my savings at risk anymore, it's my kids college tuition. Luckily, my wife has a pretty good job, so I'm a little more flexible of late, but I'm still not going to be out on a limb risking a years worth of ramen subsistence when I have kids to worry about.
Surprised (Score:1, Informative)
Forget about the fact of basic fairness, that women in the field tell you that there is a bias, that the numbers of women are appallingly low in some fields, that women, on average, outperform men in a wide number of essential skills in good IT: as an issue of being competitive in industry, not taking advantage of a diverse workforce is cutting your throat. If every member of your team comes from the same background, thinks along the same lines, works the same way, the odds are that you are missing something. It may not bite you today, or tomorrow, but it will bite you. If any of you are managers, consider whether cloning your best worker (or yourself) is really such a good idea.
Having people that don't fit into a particular male culture is a good thing for business. For non-managers, learn to deal with it.